Antecedents and Consequences of Job Satisfaction

: Evidence from Pakistani Universities

Muhammad Ghafoor

Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis › Doctor of Philosophy

Abstract

The study of human labour and its social organisation is central to our understanding of the development of human work and satisfaction. Within the developing parts of the world in the Twenty First century the question of organising work in order to facilitate growth and development is of great importance. Middle income economies, such as Pakistan, future lies with satisfying both the demands created by the basic needs of a large and growing unskilled urbanising population and the higher level needs generated by a small, yet growing, educated and skilled workforce. The current study briefly examine our understanding of work and the social organisation of employment within the critical literatures on Labour Process Theory, Well-Being and Motivation in order to contrast them with the literature within Human Resource Management. In doing so it seeks to both contextualise the discussion of work within a historical framework and develop an understanding of the role of motivation theories for job satisfaction. This thesis seeks to fill a gap in the literature by investigating a wider study of antecedents and the consequence for job satisfaction focussing specifically upon the academic staff of public and private sectors universities in Punjab, Pakistan. In particular, Herzberg’s two-factor theory and Meyer and Allen’s affective commitment models provide useful insights and observations in their relationship with job satisfaction.This thesis is using a questionnaire to examine the antecedents (organizational commitment and organizational culture) and consequences of job satisfaction (intention to leave and intention to stay). The prepared population comprised of 6,327 academic staff containing Lecturers, Assistant Professors, Associate Professors and Professors. A simple random sampling design was used to obtain 310 academic staff and usable questionnaires were obtained from 299 academic staff, 96.45% of the total sample size. The statistical techniques; Cronbach’s Alpha, Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Structure Equation Modelling (SEM), Spearman’s rho Correlation, Analysis of Variance Analysis (ANOVA) and Independent sample T-Test were applied to test a range of hypotheses in the current research, utilizing the soft-ware packages ‘Statistical Packages for Social Sciences’ (SPSS) and ‘Analysis of a Moment Structures’ (AMOS) version 17 and 18, respectively.The key findings of the SEM suggested thought-provoking results that are missing in the existing literature, such as there was a moderate, statistically significant positive relationships between affective commitment, supportiveness and competiveness with motivator factors. Work motivation was positively correlated with motivator factors and negatively with hygiene factors. Moreover, the hygiene factors were negatively correlated with intention to leave. There was very strong, positive relationships between motivator and hygiene factors with job satisfaction as compared to affective commitment. Furthermore, organizational commitment, organizational culture and work motivation are shown to be antecedents of job satisfaction and positively correlated with it. In addition, job satisfaction was a determinant of the intention to leave and negatively correlated with it. In general approximately 1% of the academicians out of 299 were overall dissatisfied, 49% were neutral and remaining 50% were satisfied with their jobs. The findings suggested that demographic characteristics revealed mixed results in terms of job satisfaction. The academic staff involved in research activities were comparatively more satisfied with their jobs than their counterparts. The results lead to a number of important policy implications and also develop our theoretical understanding for the quantification of job satisfaction.